Still growing! Yesterday I snipped off half a dozen leaves, tore them up, and put them in my favorite soup instead of the usual dried stuff. The taste is markedly different; it was really good!

Here we are, on day 27. I still haven’t added any water. It looks like it’s about half empty now; when I remember to go to the store and buy some bottled water, I’ll fill it back up.

Every once in a while I like to do a round of maintenance on my homelab. This generally includes cleaning everything up, modernizing where I can, and so on. The beginning of 2024 seemed like an excellent time, but also a bit more …

Day 24. Three and a half weeks, and still looking good! Only a few more before I should have some fresh basil for my kitchen… My cats have become… interested…

I’ve been making a number of changes in my local environment (more on that in a few days I think), and I ran across a problem that is, as far as I can tell, fairly undocumented.

I finally got around to finishing up the sharing stuff; look for the little sharing icons on the upper right of a post header or a project page. Note that I haven’t tested LinkedIn or Twitter; I use neither service and …

I’ve always been vaguely interested in growing my own food; for some reason, it’s really appealing. Outdoor gardening, however, is generally messy and a huge amount of work. Historically, that has kept me away.

Happy New Year! Yeah, I’m a little late on this one. Some time back in April I got distracted (read: fell into a fiction rabbit hole) and stopped working on things, including this blog.

It’s been a fairly unfocused week, but I’ve somehow managed to allocate an hour here or there to letterbox. My goal has been to validate my current design choices: the use of shift registers to drive the display, fed by an …

As I was working on the preliminary letterbox design, I noticed a fairly severe oversight. All of my experiments were based on a single display module, which an ESP8266 or ESP32 can handle easily using our chosen algorithm.

The common i2c bus (or TWI, or whatever non-trademarked name your manufacturer is using) is fairly easy to design with. It’s just a couple of wires, right? Well, mostly… You also need a pair of pull-up resistors.

Early experiments are complete; it’s time to put together the list of what I want in my new toy. This is… surprisingly complicated. There are a lot of moving parts, so to speak, and many rabbit holes to go tripping …